New build! https://wiki.arcengames.com/index.php?title=AI_War_2:The_Final_Cycle#4.006_Careful_Of_That_Federation.21
This one has a lot of bugfixes, some balance tuning, some mod updates, and also a new mod.
The starting position for Ark Empires is now more flexible, which is a nice boost for them (and what I had intended from the start). Big thanks to StarKelp for implementing that.
There were some deadlocks possible in recent versions, under apparently rare circumstances, but any-at-all is too frequent. I believe those were related to some locks that I put into the threading code in the prior week or so, and that has now been further refactored to no longer require locks, and thus not be possible to have deadlock. It will also run very slightly faster this way. Fingers crossed that was the correct code that was actually doing the deadlock, because that was a super rare thing. The deadlock, specifically, was "the game still responds fine, but time won't progress and commands won't be accepted anymore." The joys of multithreading mean that it's a lot different from the old style "program is frozen and we have to forcibly kill it."
I also put in a bunch of code to try to catch the issue with game commands getting corrupted on MP clients after a long period of playing. So far I've been running an MP session for about 20 minutes now (it's still running as I type) and I don't see any issues, but I didn't see them before, either. Hopefully the folks that did see the issues previously no longer will.
The new mod is the "Hydral Federation," by StarKelp, and is described as follows: "All of the races, fresh from the best ending from The Last Federation, have come to this galaxy. Lead by the Hydral, they have seen the endless war propagated by yourselves and the AI and have deemed you both a lost cause."
I find this absolutely hilarious and wonderful that these creations from our 2014 hit strategy game are now invading here via a mod. Did you know that that specific last Hydral is also the main character in our 2016 overlooked-gem Starward Rogue? It's a set a few billion years later, so the timeline of this mod actualyl checks out fine.
In other news, the DLC3 page has been updated to have its final feature list properly documented: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466780/AI_War_2_The_Neinzul_Abyss/
Until today, it had a mixture of proper features, scrapped features, features we gave you for free, features we moved to the expanded DLC1, and lots of missing features that we added since that page was last updated. April 21 is looking to be the real release day for this, for realsies this time, so that's exciting!
Badger has been working himself to the bone and is stepping back a bit now that his work for DLC3 is done, and will pretty much just be handling any really serious bugfixes I hand him. I'm also having to transition partially to the next project to make sure that I get things set up well enough so that people who are contractors now will have an actual proper full job when that starts in a few months. I have a lot of prep work to do, and all of it is still super secret, but I'm going to be really excited to share more of it with you in about a year. Usually you can get morsels out of me about upcoming stuff, because I just can't help but share, however that is often a really poor marketing decision and this time it's not my choice. It's all good.
I've been talking for a long about doing a Super Supporter DLC for this game, given how very costly and unprofitable this game has been to make, so that folks who feel like they got more than their money's worth could chip in more if they were so inclined. Even just setting up something really simple there takes time I don't have, and in general it leaves me with an iffy feeling to have a product like that, so we're just going to skip it. One of the planned bonuses will just be a free mod (that requires DLC3) that I put out.
More to come soon.
Enjoy!